While You…

While you were out there, I set out on a Southern retreat

So I may become light

There was boundless angst on the rocks where pilgrims set afoot

As if drained by the burden of six million souls.

The cave is shallower and mould festers in a few sacred corners

Is it an omen of things to follow?

Daylight appears with the sounds of shrieking vultures

Their wings, claws and balding heads cover the rays in mutiny

At night the lamp burns with a listless melancholy

My eyes narrow in a trance, I see myself disappear.

Inside the holy lake

Strange imageries scar the mind and create a desolate fate

The water runs until it is but a wild stream flowing on muddied ground

I see an austere forecast written in the dirt

 Nuns shall sing and soar in flames.

While you were out there, it was then I set my body afire

so it may become your inspiration.

Although I admire intellectual work by men and women I find that as I grow older I am more drawn towards those that are authored by women. It is not surprising given that my bodily and psychological experiences have more in common with them and because the personal is political (to use a cliché) I am much more affected by what happens to women, their fate and their voice. Therefore as a reader I loved Ray’s Fields of Protest: Women’s movement in India (1999).

The title is self-explanatory, however this isn’t a book review so I will not go into great lengths about it. I leave that for a time when I have more energy to write. All I can say is that I loved the complexity of issues the book touched and the depth in which it dealt with Calcutta and Mumbai women’s struggle against social and economic poverty because what I know of these cities are half-mashed concoctions from films, novels and individual accounts, not to dispute the validity of such views but who can compare against the breadth and depth of a well planned study?

After finishing the book I had a strong impulse to grab my ever-so-read-and-mentioned A Room of One’s Own by Wolf. Of course there are lots of fine essays written on women’s issues but Room of One’s Own is closest to my memory. I was in a literature class. It was no small coincidence that it happened to be my first day amongst a bunch of white Caucasian literature students. Me, the only Asian face, arrived a week ago from exotic Tibet, dealing with wounds and issues that seemed larger than life at the time. That class was my therapy and Wolf’s words jumpstarted my road to recovery.

Like all good works that stand the test of time and interpretation, the below lines fit our context even now despite the fact that some things may have improved since the time Wolf wrote the essay. “For it is (still) a perennial puzzle why no (Tibetan) women wrote much of that extraordinary literature when every other (Tibetan) man, it seemed was capable of a song or a sonnet. What were the conditions in which (Tibetan) women lived?” (Chapter 3, A Room of One’s Own). The inserts are all mine. Pun very much intended.

Rinpoche is an authority figure on some subjects. Yet for the same reason that people don’t seek medical advice from anyone but a medical professional (at least in this day and age) I also think twice about a monk speaking on women’s rights. Besides the lack of relevant educational background, there is also issues regarding association, life and lived experiences. He is not a woman, nor married to a woman or has children / family life. I also doubt that his reflections stemmed from an acute and prolonged observation and study of women’s issues. Moreover, there is no social justice movement in the history of our planet, which has not been won and contested without some form of struggle/protest/fight by the oppressed. I admit that to some extent the struggle to eliminate discrepancies may have become more subtle thus leading many to think it doesn’t exist but we need to only look beneath the surface pretensions and it’s there in all its glory. Both the women’s movement and the Tibetan movement are based on social justice because of the systemic violation of rights and discrimination in social, economic and political spheres. Yet has anyone ever declared the focus of the Tibetan movement as not about fighting for rights but to empower Tibetans. Empowerment cannot happen without rights and there will always be a fight for rights (in practice) as long as discriminations remain.

If Rinpoche has indeed singlehandedly found a way to empower women without raising the issue of women’s rights then feminists and women’s movement proponents around the world should truly honor him. After a long history of burning ‘witches’ and confirming the inferiority of the ‘other’ sex in a thousand ways, lo and behold a representative of the clergy has finally found the route to our empowerment! The irony! The irony of it all should be their last words, a la Kurtz! However, I doubt it is the case. The greats and pseudo greats in our society are used to sharing their philosophical wisdom and advice without so much as by your leave. I call it word play and Rinpoche is a front-runner. His speeches are high on words, low on explanations and the masses are left ever divided on their own interpretation of what the great Rinpoche meant by it all. I find it a rather old school way of intimidation through display of one’s ‘knowledge’; more precisely it’s a word charade and the mating dance of the birds of paradise. For those that say Rinpoche shouldn’t be blamed for his superiority, I argue that while he is not to be blamed for his intellectual prowess the onus is on him (by the very same token of his superiority and responsibility as the prime minister) to speak in a way the audience is able to understand especially on issues that have direct consequences on people’s lives. There is no need for tantric melodrama after all we are talking about contemporary social issues not religious epiphanies.

The tragedy is the lack of Tibetan women and groups responding to his statement and/or demanding explanations on what he meant by such a statement. I am left with Beauvoir’s astute observation in her seminal work “The Second Sex”- we women carry multiple identities all of which seems to come first at the cost of our primary identity as women, when in fact this very identity shapes our social destiny and others perception of us. The Tibetan Women’s Association is such a classic example.

p.s. Conspiracy theorists may believe I am a Rinpoche basher. Yet I maintain I have no affiliations with any such individuals or groups. As a member of the Tibetan public I support some of his reforms in the Tibetan exile government while opposing those that I don’t agree with. My only rule of thumb is not to get blinded by the cult of personality.

It may very well be that I see patterns where there are none. In my observation, increasingly in the last decade or so Indian writers have shed their predecessors’ somewhat whimsical overindulgence in long flowery passages (a colonial hangover?)and embraced a la minimalist trend; although they haven’t reached Palahniuk heights yet. This relatively new found love for economy of words and precision have also brought with it an unapologetic brand of desi humor that is fresh and crass at times. In that sense, White Tiger (for me) was a coming of age Indian writing in English. I loved the book from its opening letter to the Chinese president to its closing line. Last summer, undettered by its plunge in the bathtub I blow-dryed the book and gifted it to a Chinese friend whom I met through Woeser La. I hope he took better care of it than I did. All this is not to say the more classical Anglo-Indian writing style faces extinction. Far from it. Parallel to the new ‘developments’ there will always be a stylized Rushdie writing his/her magnum opus every couple of years.

Going back to Amit Varma, I have been trolling his blog for a new post. All in vain. Nonetheless while browsing his archives I found this post on promoting reading, which I wanted to share http://indiauncut.com/iublog/article/kindle-your-children/ I wonder if you can download Tibetan language books on Kindle. That will be a feat! Amongst contemporary Tibetan language writers, I would love to read Dhondup Gyal’s work. Come to think of it are  there any articles on Tibetan literary movements? I am an ignoramus.

P.S. I have been doing some background reading on feminist theories. So the next post might be an analytical rant. Happy April Fool’s Day!